


In Aeternum

by Temporalis (Elvaron)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-12
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-04 02:06:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4122079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elvaron/pseuds/Temporalis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>He needs her. That’s very him.</i> Rose and the Metacrisis Doctor’s happy ending in the parallel world. Except that happiness can be a terribly a subjective emotion that depends on whose perspective you’re looking at it from.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Aeternum

**Author's Note:**

> Prototype concept fic.
> 
> Warning: Dark themes ahead, reader discretion advised. (This fic is not what it looks like.)

He needs her.  
  
That’s very him.  
  
He’s her responsibility now, this human-Time Lord Metacrisis, bound to her in time and space, the last request and command of the Doctor of two hearts. Rose Tyler isn’t good at obeying orders, but she is good at taking care of wounded, damaged Time Lords. That’s what he said, after all - she made him better.  
  
She makes this one better too. She stands by his side, reminds him what it means to be the Doctor. Pushes him when he falters, consoles him when he breaks. She holds his hand, every step of the long trek through the darkness.  
  
(He has fewer nightmares these days. But when he does get them, he screams.)  
  
Her heart bleeds for him, watching him suffer through the ignominy and weakness of a human body, and she spares no expense to provide him with the best medical equipment that Torchwood can afford. It still takes a while to talk him around to accepting her help - he can be so  _stubborn_ , so fixed on the idea that there are so many things that he can’t change, doesn’t deserve.   
  
But he listens to her, in the end. He always does.   
  
Healing doesn’t happen immediately, of course. Rome wasn’t built in a day, even if Gallifrey burned in a moment out of time. But Rose has learnt patience through the years, along with a thing or two or a thousand about human and Time Lords. Oh, she makes mistakes too. Sometimes, she pushes too hard, comes down too harsh even when she knows he’s trying. But it’s fine, they’re learning. She holds him when he cries, comforts him when the world gets too much, stands beside him as he struggles to find his feet again. 

Every time he breaks, she rebuilds him, and he needs her a little bit more. 

Eventually, she realises that she needs to adapt if she wants to get anywhere, and adapt she does, finding new ways to get him to where he should be. She learns the best ways to talk him round, which buttons to press to get the best results. Learns what's best for him. Learns that it's better to take an active approach to his healing rather than waiting passively for things to happen. 

(Time Lords are difficult to break, even half Time Lords, but Rose is nothing if not persistent.)

She holds the scalpel to his chest when he decides that it’s a bad idea to transplant that second heart, and can’t he just see that it’s only for his own good? (He can’t. He forces her to take matters into her own hands, and it’s just as well that Rose Tyler has never been known to do as the Doctor tells her.)   
  
The operation seems to change something between them. He’s sick for weeks after that, sick and ungrateful and unwilling to even look at her, but Rose stays by his side. In sickness and in health, they promised each other, a year after he arrived in this parallel world, and Rose intends to honour it even when he keeps trying to push her away. It hurts when he rails at her, when she has to station a guard outside his door to stop him from running, when they have to restrain him to stop him from hurting himself. He’s not well, she reminds herself, and it’s her job to make him better. No matter the cost.   
  
Sometimes, when he screams at her, demanding to know what she’s done to him, what she’s done to  _herself_ , she doubts, and her resolve almost falters. But then she remembers that she’s doing it for  _his_  sake - both of their sakes, really, him of the pinstriped brown and him of the pinstriped blue, and hardens her heart. Sometimes, there needs to be pain before healing. Sometimes, even quite a lot of it.   
  
Still, when he stares at her like she’s betrayed him somehow, she’s not quite sure why she feels almost guilty. It's not like she's hurting him for  _fun_ , after all.  
  
(She gets nightmares too, now. Sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night and can’t tell whether the screams are hers, or his.)  
  
In the end, she seeks professional help. Torchwood provides, of course, teams of the best and the brightest in every field - psychiatry, medicine, xenology. A combination of counselling and medication calms him down and restores him to a level of sanity again. It’s a shame that the medication makes him exhausted all the time, but he’s so much more pliable now that he’s remembered that he actually does need her. She can be gentle with him now, and it’s almost like old times again, when he rests his head in her lap and she cards her hands through his hair, talking quietly to him for hours. She knows he’s quiet only because he doesn’t have the strength left to argue, but eventually he’ll come round. He always does. No one knows him better than she does, after all. She knows his every crack and weakness. His every button and string. She's the one who wipes his tears away after her team is done with him, and she tells herself that eventually he'll stop flinching from her touch. 

(She doesn’t think about what the brown-suited Doctor would have thought any more. He’s not here, and she has only herself to rely on.)

It still takes months of incredibly hard work before they can break down his barriers, but one day, she sees a flash of panic in his eyes when she leaves his cell, and she knows she’s gotten him back.   
  
Things improve quite quickly after that. 

  
Three years after arriving in the parallel world, she persuades him to construct a chameleon arch. A heart transplant is all very well and good, but that was only the first step in the process, after all. Two hearts alone does not a Time Lord make.  
  
He gets cold feet - of  _course_  he does - doubting whether what he’s doing is right, and Rose is exasperated. But he won’t deny her anything (ever again), and in the end, his love for her ( _or is it fear_   _of her_ _? some days, it’s hard to tell_ ) is what drives him to realise his destiny. Silly Doctor, Rose thinks. Never able to recognise what’s good for him. She knows he’ll feel lightyears better when he feels like a Time Lord again.  
  
And he does. When he rewrites his DNA back to the triple stranded Time Lord helix that it should have been, it’s like he gets a new lease of life. There is a light in his eyes again, a clarity that had been missing for far too long, and he’s almost the Doctor again–  
  
–no, Rose realises, he’s better than the Doctor. He’s the Doctor fully healed, all his scars removed. He’s what the Doctor should have been, the Oncoming Storm, the Lord of Time, with the very pulse of the universe at his fingertips.   
  
When he reaches out to reclaim what is rightfully his, she continues to stay by his side. He still needs guidance, sometimes, and that’s what she gives him - but the days of arguing and anger and tears is over, and these days, all it takes is the right word in the right place. He builds his TARDIS, then an armada, and sweeps through time and space. Evil crumbles at his feet, nation and planet and star system falling before him, and the galaxy learns a peace that it had never known. There are those who call him the Bringer of Darkness, but you can’t have light without shadow, as they say. And she makes sure that these naysayers never say it twice. After all, it tends to hurt him to hear those words.  
  
Before they leave for Andromeda, they stumble across this universe’s version of the Untempered Schism. He stares into it, her hand in his, and this time, he does not run.   
  
Relative time loses its meaning when you’re a time traveller, but Rose fancies it’s perhaps their fifth anniversary when he gives her the gift of a Time Lord’s immortality. She wonders if it’s truly necessary - after all, she is not merely human, for all her appearance; she is the Wolf, the Moment, a being that does not truly exist in the same way that humans and Time Lords do. But she’s been taught never to say no to a present, and she accepts it with a smile. It’s the thought that counts, after all, and the biggest gift of all is his acknowledgement that he needs her and wants her by his side forevermore.  
  
And that’s what they have now, she reflects, looking down at the construction of New Gallifrey from the doors of the TARDIS – forever. Their hard earned happy ever after.  
  
She wonders why the Doctor still screams in his sleep sometimes, but she reminds herself that they have all of eternity to fix that. She knows she’ll make him better. It’s what she does. 


End file.
